How to Backpack Through Europe, With Kids

We had an underwear problem before we even got on the Europe-bound airplane. Cal — our sweet, expressive, supposedly potty-trained 5-year-old — had soiled his pants.

“Sorry, Mommy,” he said, embarrassed.

“It’s O.K.,” my wife assured him.

Under normal circumstances, such accidents are merely a nuisance, part of our job description as parents. But these were not normal circumstances.

My wife, Eva, and I had pulled our two boys, Cal, and his brother, Cormac, 7, out of school six weeks early to backpack across Europe: one month and 2,000 miles, from London to Budapest. Just backpacks, no massive roller bags. Just the stripped-down basics, not the mounds of gear you see families humping through airports, like J. Crew-clad Sherpas going to the mountaintop — or the nearest Starbucks.

It was the way Eva and I had traveled (before children) across Turkey, China, Vietnam and Japan. Our backpacks — salvaged from the shed behind our house in uptown New Orleans — bore the scars of travel, long ago. And we wanted our boys to appreciate this way of life. Or, at least, learn to deal with it. We were taking only the necessities: limited clothes, no toys and no iPads. If we were doing this, we wanted the boys to interact with the world around them, not with a glowing screen.

Our parents told us we were wasting our money. Our children would never remember this trip or even know they were in Europe. And our friends said we were “ brave” — meaning, of course, we were crazy.

We figured we would be fine. We believed the boys would adapt, as they typically do. We prepped them for weeks, preaching flexibility — there would not be ketchup with every meal in Europe — and teaching geography. Who can show us France on the map?

But underwear, clean underwear, was key.

“We’re down to four pair for Cal,” Eva informed me, with great solemnity, as we headed to the airport.

I shrugged.

“Who can tell me where we’re going?” I asked.

Cormac, an independent and curious first grader with deep dimples, began listing the countries, rapid fire. “England, France, Germany …”

We flew into London’s Heathrow Airport at midday, jet-lagged on four hours of sleep. Our apartment, booked through Airbnb, was in South Kensington — centrally located and, my wife promised, “chic.” But inside it was wanting.

Advertised as a two-bedroom at a whopping £210 (about $315) a night, the small apartment actually had only two rooms and one real bed. The other bed was a hard, fake leather twin-size futon. London was our test case, baby steps to foreign travel. And we fell down that first week (a lot) as we tried to cram in too much, too fast: the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, the city’s 443-foot-high Ferris wheel on the bank of the Thames River, and so on.

Cormac ran ahead, losing himself briefly in crowds on the Tube. “Mind the gap!” I found myself uttering sentences that, previously, felt ridiculous in my mouth. “Boys, get off the tomb, please.” And then there was the Apple Incident in the back row of the No. 74 double-decker bus at rush hour one night. While Eva and I were distracted, informing Cormac that it wasn’t polite to shout on the bus — no matter how excited he was to ride it — Cal, hungry at the end of another long day, found a half-eaten apple of unknown origins and bit into it, swallowing at least one bite of the discarded fruit. As his mother and I twisted our faces in horror (“Why would you eat that?”), our innocent son just shrugged.

“Next time,” Cal said, “let’s bring an apple.”

By Day 6, everyone was exhausted, and we were on the move again, to Stonehenge, 90 miles west of London. Weeks earlier, we had booked a Stone Circle Access tour, a good call. For £96 ($144), we would be able to walk right up to the massive stones, after hours, at sunset, with just a handful of others. No hordes of tourists, held back by ropes and guards. It is the only way to do it.

But by the time we finally stood beneath the iconic bluestones, the boys were interested in only two things: collecting rocks on the ground (against the rules) and playing hide-and-seek (also against the rules). “Dad, run!” they shouted. “Dad, he’s coming! Hide!”

The security guards smiled, turning the other way. And so, we ran and hid while others walked around in quiet homage to the long-ago people.

“That’ll knacker them out,” one guard told me, with sympathy, as my children scampered about. I smiled. The man understood us. But he would not have appreciated the discovery I made later that night back at the youth hostel. Cormac had made off with a pile of sacred Stonehenge pebbles, stuffed inside his pockets.

We escaped to France a day later, by train via the Chunnel, and found solace in Paris. Out of necessity, we learned to slow down, leaving our Airbnb apartment (perfect, this time) for sightseeing as late as 11 o’clock on some mornings. We simply couldn’t travel with children as we had traveled before.

Still, we took the stairs up the first two levels of the Eiffel Tower (704, in all) instead of the elevator. We ate heaping bowls of pho (a first for the boys) at Foyer Vietnam, a casual cafe, owned by the Vietnamese Embassy. And we learned the importance of protecting your chocolate éclairs. Freshly bought from our neighborhood patisserie in the 11th Arrondissement, ours were stolen while we played tag in a park.

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Cal was stunned. “Maybe they’ll steal the Mona Lisa next!” he said. But we got more éclairs, free: The manager of La Pâtisserie Cyril Lignac refused to charge us, having been charmed by the little American boys who had tried to speak French to him.

The hospitality continued at our bed-and-breakfast, Le Vermont, housed in a 19th-century Norman farmhouse near the rocky cliffs on the English Channel, three hours from Paris.

Hilary Cornet, Le Vermont’s proprietor, allowed our boys to collect the eggs from her chicken coop — a highlight for them every morning. And we spent two days (not enough, it turned out) visiting the World War II memorials.

We worried that these monuments wouldn’t hold the boys’ attention. But at Utah Beach, where American soldiers died coming ashore 71 years ago, Cormac and Cal dug in the sand, happy. At Pointe du Hoc, where United States Army Rangers famously scaled the cliffs, our boys ran through the bomb craters, now filled with grass. And at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial at Omaha Beach, with its endless rows of white tombstones, the children slowed down, sensing the gravity of the place. We had prepared to tell them about some of the dead buried in the 9,387 graves. And the boys were attentive before they turned to pick dandelions. Cormac wanted to leave a yellow flower at the grave of Elizabeth Richardson, a Red Cross nurse killed in a plane crash in 1945. “I’m going to put a rock on it,” he told me, “so it doesn’t blow away.”

The boys knew where they were. “France!” Cal shouted. They started trying new things: quail eggs for breakfast and rump steak for dinner. As travelers, we had found a rhythm. And after nine days in France, we took a high-speed train to Munich, a rental car to Austria, and a cable car to our next stop: Mount Dachstein, elevation 9,826 feet, about 45 miles from Salzburg.

In the Eastern Alps, there is a large network of what Austrians call “mountain huts.” And we had planned to spend three nights in one of them: the Lodge am Krippenstein, a remote wood-framed inn. Even in May, when we arrived, there was deep snow in places. And for two days, we were almost completely alone on this craggy moonscape in the clouds. But it wasn’t lonesome up there thanks to the view and the lodge’s owner, 70-year-old Toni Rosifka, who has large calloused hands and a limp from a hard fall years ago while rock climbing. On our first night there, the mountaineer offered our boys a ride on his snowmobile. His “snow machine,” he called it. And that was it. For the next two days, while Eva and I snowshoed across the mountain, the boys rode ahead of us with the innkeeper — Mr. Toni, they called him.

“Life is an adventure,” Mr. Rosifka said at one point, taking a break during one long hike and watching the boys run through the snow. “They know this.”

From there, we hopscotched east: We drove to Vienna and hopped aboard a high-speed catamaran, heading down the Danube River, into Slovakia. We spent one night in Bratislava, Slovakia’s riverside capital, before boarding a crowded, slow-moving train for Hungary. We had made arrangements to stay with friends at the Sauska winery and vineyard amid the rolling hills of Villany, 135 miles south of Budapest, on the doorstep of the Balkans.

“Exactly how far is it to Croatia?” I asked our host, Stefanie Sauska, on our first night there, standing on a terrace with a glass of white wine in hand and surveying the grape vines stretching to the golden horizon.

“That,” she said, gesturing to the tree line a few miles south of us, “is Croatia.”

Had we been alone — had my wife and I been traveling together, without the children — we would have made a run for it, with our packs on our backs. We would have claimed that Croatian passport stamp, making a day trip into the country, whatever it took to see more, go farther. But backpacking with our boys had taught us something unexpected: We didn’t need to keep going. We were good right here, at the beautiful vineyard in Villany, doing the thing we were doing right now. We watched, content, as the children chased each other in the fields. A roasted duck dinner would be served soon. The hosts emerged from the cellar with another bottle of wine. Where else did we need to be?

It was a lesson Cormac and Cal had learned two weeks earlier near the Austrian town of Reutte, just across the German border. We were traveling by rental car at the time, lost in a misty rain, when Eva looked up to see a spindly footbridge straddling two mountaintops. “Pull off,” she urged me. “This,” she said, turning to the children, “is what traveling’s all about.” We learned the story of the bridge at a visitors’ center, just off the road. The walkway, called Highline 179, is five feet wide, a quarter mile long, suspended nearly 40 stories over the highway, B179 below, and is made of metal wire and slats —which means, when you look down, it looks and feels as if you’re walking on air.

I let out a short laugh. My wife is afraid of heights and I don’t like them either. But we found ourselves paying 24 euros (about $27) for our bridge tickets because that is what you do in Reutte, and then, together as a family, stepping out onto the precarious pathway in the sky, reportedly the longest pedestrian footbridge in the world. It swayed and bounced in the wind. I froze, unable to look down. Even though there was no feasible way any of us could plummet to our deaths — even the children — given the mesh-wire sides and railings, I wasn’t going one step farther. And neither were Eva and Cormac. They had already turned around to go back to land. But Cal was making a stand.

He had gone 18 days, at that point, without a single accident in his precious four pair of underwear. He had eaten salmon, soup and shrimp in their shells (verboten items at home) and learned to say, “Merci.” He could tell you right where he was — on a harrowing bridge in the mountains of Austria — and he was walking across it. Cal was adamant about going across the bridge.

“Come on, Dad,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”

I had no response. I knew my son was right, and I knew what I had to do. We walked across the bridge, he and I, all the way to the other side and all the way back, looking right past our feet to the earth below. Eva and Cormac followed after awhile, going about a third of the way, as far as they could go. We were in this together. We were floating on air, and we would live to recount the tale.

That night, safely inside our hotel room in the majestic former Olympic town of Innsbruck, we laughed over takeout Indian food as we retold the story of our day, and the bridge and the bravery we all found inside of us.

It was 10 p.m. Way too late for dinner, way past bedtime for the boys. And none of us cared. There was only one question that mattered and Cormac asked it first. “Where are we going next?”

A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 2015, on Page TR12 of the New York edition with the headline: When Two for the Road Becomes Four. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe